Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [88]
At first, they put great hopes in the idea that friendlies were just around the next coconut palm. “For the first four or five days at Serang,” Lanson Harris said, “we were very up. We thought any minute now the Marines were going to come crashing through the door and rescue us. I didn’t know where the Marines were going to come from. All I knew is that Marines were pretty good at this kind of stuff.” Others were less sure, although the confidence certainly was contagious.
Months before, the Marines had turned in a performance in defense of Wake Island that was as inspirational to home morale as the Houston’s exploits might have been had full details reached the mainland. But those Marines were Japanese prisoners now. Their brothers in the Corps were still several months away from settling on Guadalcanal as their first major objective. It took only a few weeks for the mood to darken. “We began to mellow out and to think, Boy, we’re a thousand miles from home and nobody’s going to come get us out,” Harris said.
Their world contracted around the here and now. Food was the top priority in that world, and the Japanese did little to satisfy it. “We were hungry to the point of it being actual torture,” said Charley Pryor, held at the Serang jail. They learned that the feeling of extreme hunger was both mental and physical, a transition phase from relative abundance to a crisis of want. They would grow accustomed to far worse. The sign of trouble would be when their hunger pangs disappeared altogether.
“After about two weeks, things began to get very uptight,” Lanson Harris said. “We began to hear a lot of stupid arguments. There were a lot of fights. I remember a fellow named Blackie Strickland who was arguing with another fellow over how many pancakes he could eat. I can eat twenty-six pancakes. You’re a damn liar! You can’t eat twenty-six pancakes. Next thing you know they’re down on the deck punching holes in each other.”
Six weeks in Serang were a short education in the utility of discipline, leadership, and unit integrity. The Japanese, apparently seeing the risks inherent in those same things, undertook to erode them. The first week of April, they ordered most of the Houston’s officers to board trucks. Eight of them—Al Maher, William Galbraith, Joseph Dalton, Bob Fulton, Frank Gallagher, Harlan Kirkpatrick, Tommy Payne, and Walter Winslow—were taken from the camp to the docks of Tanjung Priok and put on a prison ship destined for Japan. Three line officers stayed behind, Lt. Russell R. Ross, buckled with dysentery, Lieutenant Hamlin, and Ensign Smith, as well as the two ship’s doctors, Cdr. William Epstein and Lt. Clement Burroughs. The departing officers would arrive at Shimonoseki, Japan, on May 4, beginning a journey entirely distinct from the one that would engulf the men left behind on Java.
The scattering of the Houston’s men to the far corners of Asia achieved something that the Japanese never quite could with guns and torpedoes. Tokyo Rose wouldn’t be crowing about it, but the dispersal of the survivors ensured that one of the fleet’s best-drilled fighting crews, the officers and bluejackets who had given life to a presidential flagship, ceased finally to exist. They would forge their identities afresh in the crucible of captivity.
CHAPTER 25
On February 28, 1942, the Navy Department had issued to the press Communiqué No. 48, making vague reference to a “major action” fought by an Allied fleet against a much larger Japanese force trying to land troops on Java. “From fragmentary reports received in the Navy Department,” it read, “American naval forces participating in this action consisted of one heavy cruiser and five destroyers.” Two weeks later, on March 14, the Navy put out Communiqué No. 54, recounting in more detail the great battle the Houston had fought on February 27. The report stated she had survived